I guess I need to explain myself better, I just assume that everything I do has a self-evident logic, and then when people don't get it I get all alienated and Jack says, I don't have on my mind-reading hat right now, why don't you just tell me what the fuck?

What's going on is that my self image is undergoing another in a series of shifts. Like, I worked really hard to embrace being a mother, and I think I carry it pretty well, but right now I need to bring in before-motherhood me -- the me that lost a portion of the hearing in her right ear by standing too close to the stage at a Throwing Muses show -- and let her decide what we're going to wear today. So I put on the homemade cut-off jeans miniskirt and the motorcycle boots and I took down the darling crying baby banner and put up one that says, Bizarre drawings of chimps in clown suits are not fun for children!

And I love my child more than my own heart. He is my heart, beating outside of my body. He kills me dead every day. He smiles coyly at old people. He throws his ball to strange kids with complete confidence that they'll throw it back. He drinks horchata with the girls at the laundromat. He reassuringly pats his father on the ass. After I help him jump out of the bathtub at night he hugs me as hard as he can, his little arms quiver with hugging.

Neither I nor this site are leaving him behind. But I need to write about me as mom and about me as not-mom, and I needed a banner that said, I don't feel like being nurturing right now, I feel like menacing everyone with clowns and rollerskating primates. Forgive me if that seems aggressively unwelcoming. It may change again tomorrow. But this war is making me edgy. And Derek Jeter got maimed at third. And Mr. Noodle's brother Mr. Noodle is dead.

Life's a bitch and then you post about it on your blog!

Here's the last stanza of a poem by W. B. Yeats:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.